Periodically, Thinking Man’s Politics will feature guest bloggers, some of whom may hold opinions that differ-sometimes widely-from those of ‘Thinking Man’. But it’s important not to live in a ‘echo chamber’ where we only want to hear people and things we already agree with. Part of what makes us better, and makes us better able to defend our opinions, is to challenge ourselves from time to time, and to be open to opposing views even if we ultimately still don’t agree with them.

The blog entry below is taken from an article written by Connor Touhey, a budding journalist and current Opinion Editor of the University of Wisconsin’s Badger Herald. The piece was written prior to the election but the message still holds and probably is even more important now than it was then.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is looking for a new chair to lead the party and earlier this week held a forum at George Washington University for those seeking that position. One candidate, Sally Boynton Brown, who heads the Idaho Democratic Party, stressed that the DNC needs to provide better training for Party staff and workers.

She had some….well, some very ‘special’ thoughts on what that training should include:

“We have to, at the DNC, provide training. We have to teach them how to communicate, how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white. So I think I made my point.”

For over 200 years, Inauguration Day has been a symbol of the peaceful transition of power for the United States, the culmination of the democratic elections which has been the foundation of our country since its founding. Continue reading “Inauguration Follies”

In the news is that the Ringling Bros. Circus has announced it will be shutting down after over 100 years. For those of us born before the internet/digital age, it’s truly the end of an era but fortunately, we have the ongoing circus that is Hollywood entertainment types. Continue reading “Hollywood Keeps Entertaining Us”

There has been much controversy about Russian hacking of email accounts related to the recent election. The source of hacking the emails from the Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) public was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks head Julian Assange says that the information came from a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter and not from Russia and, while that may turn out to be the case, I think we can all agree that needs to be taken with the proverbial ‘grain of salt’. No matter how they got to WikiLeaks, US intelligence communities seem to be very confident that the original hacking originated in Russia. So what does that mean for us? Continue reading “The Bottom Line on Russian Hacking”